Today’s Plan:
- Attendance
- Blog URL’s in Canvas
- Entry Question: Should Schools Teach Morality
- Reviewing Plato Reading
- Philosophy’s hero and Rhetoric’s villain
- Homework
- Discussion Post Time
Blog URL’s in Canvas
For Tuesday’s homework, I asked you to create a blog and to write a post on Plato (whether you read the Apology or Republic VII is fine). Please make sure to submit a link to that post in Canvas. Also: make sure the link is the the visible blog post, not the working post in your CMS.
Entry Question: Should Schools Teach Morality
First: we need to distinguish morality from ethics.
Reviewing Plato Reading
In case it is useful: 3 minute philosophy on Plato.
Major Talking Points:
- Allegory of the Cave
- Plato’s Politics
- What education is(n’t)
- Being vs. Becoming [dialectic]
Plato: Philosophy’s Hero and Rhetoric’s Villain
Let me open with two pictures:
The value and difficulty of thought. The danger of exclusion. What is truth? For Plato’s philosophy, truth is something we discover (or remember) beyond the bounds of human being. Over the next few weeks, we will work to articulate a more rhetorical idea of truth–one that underwrites the discipline (and importance of) professional writing.
Homework
For homework you will be reading about Plato’s rival, Isocrates. Note: not Socrates, that was Plato’s teacher. He was a skeptic, who believed the task of the philosopher was to show others that certain knowledge was impossible; Plato grasped Socrates’ methods, but not his opposition to certainty. Socrates was executed for civil disobedience, or because many of his students started a civil war and were known as the tyranny of the 30.
But back to Isocrates. Isocrates wanted to unite the people of Greece, to turn waring city-states into a nation (one who could defend itself from barbarian invaders). Thus, he invented the concept of “paideia,” the idea that there is One True Greek culture. While this might seem tyrannical, it was actually progressive in his day–since it meant being a True Greek wasn’t a matter of birth or blood, but rather a commitment to certain cultural ideas and ideals (particularly individual freedom and social good).
For homework, you will read two essay on Isocrates, one by Haskins, one by Benoit. Please write a blog post that puts them in conversation somehow: so the first paragraph offers a summary of how they agree (who is Isocrates according to Haskins and Benoit), the second paragraph focuses on a single sentence from one of the articles (and perhaps your explication compares it to a sentence from the other article? Or not). The third paragraph is up to you.
